Cue the Mormons

When I got home from work yesterday, two men in suits were standing in front of my porch.

Suits? I thought. Is something federal going down in the hood?

So I approached them and said, "Can I help you?"

And they said, "Yes...we're looking for Sarah."

"That's me," I said. "What can I do for you?"

"Well, we're missionaries from The Church of Jesus Christ of Latterday Saints," they said. "Your doctor told us you were interested in speaking with us."

"He didn't tell me," I said.

So yeah. Apparently the nice old Jewish doctor that I went to see for my antidepressant prescription last Friday is a nice old Mormon doctor...who took it upon himself to give my UNPUBLISHED ADDRESS to these guys to come solicit me for their religion.

Now, it's not like I don't appreciate the thought. But he didn't say anything at all to me about the church, or tell me, "You should talk to these people," or ask me if he could give out my private information to anyone.

And yes, as I was describing my depression to my doctor, I in fact did say that I live far from family and have had trouble finding a church. But I certainly wasn't wanting him to do anything about it beyond signing my precription.

The situation itself was funny. I was very polite and disengaged, and sent them on their way. ("So you're doing the mission thing," I said at one point. "...how's that going for you?") But the circumstances of the situation are frankly a little creepy.

I think that his action was highly unethical for a number of reasons. I mean, you can't even call Information to find me. I'm not only unlisted, I'm unpublished. For the sole reason that I want my privacy, rooted in a desire for the safety of anonymity. And now these missions-oriented men know where I live.

Yargh. Life is weird.

the eternal child

Caught in a downpour yesterday. Puddle-stomping never gets old.

my own private spa

So yes, I feel fairly certain it's sun poisoning. My skin is all clear-blistered and disgusting, and hurts like hot pokers. The color now resembles the center of a very rare steak. A living steak, in fact. And I've been feeling sick to my stomach and intestines all day. I almost threw up from the pain this morning when I eased into my shirt.

So I did a few things at work, looked totally pathetic and garnered lots of sympathy (I really do look like a slab of fried salt pork) and came home early to soothe my terrible pains in a rare luxury that I remember from a bout with the chicken pox when I was five years old:

The oatmeal bath.

I've told a few people about this amazing ritual, and they've looked at me as though I were from a far-off planet or had suddenly sprouted an extra, babbling head. But I tell you, it's the most soothing experience you'll ever have in your bathtub, and it's so incredibly cheap.

Steps to Oatmealed Bliss:

1. Find an old sock, preferably on the large/long side. You know, one of the ones that keep getting divorced from their mates in the dryer. They deserve a sticky fate anyway, the jerks.

2. Fill the sock halfway to three-quarters of the way with dry plain oatmeal. (Soooo cheap.) Knot the sock at the top (a very simple knot will do).

3. Place the sock in the tub and start the water. For best results, keep the sock under the running water.

4. Adjust the water temperature as necessary. (For a cold winter's day, a hot bath; or for a hot summer's day, or a terrible sunburn, something nice and lukewarm.)

5. Soak in the lovely smooth glutinous oatmeal water. Squeeze the oatmeal sock over the worst burns for an almost instantaneous soothing.

I'm still experimenting with whether it's best to rinse off, or just towel dry. But do make sure to at least pat the burns dry; letting them air-dry without being rinsed just causes the oatmeal glue to dry and crack, which is (hello!) painful -- as I've just discovered.

And when you're done, just squeeze the oatmeal down to the bottom of the sock, unknot it and turn it inside out, discard the oatmeal, and rinse the sock. Voile!

And anyway, an oatmeal bath is such fun ("'amusing' or 'diverting' darling, never 'such fun'") and it's the only 20 minutes I spent pain and nausea free today.

Vive l'oatmeal!

a burnt offering to Ra

Yesterday I headed up a car wash that a former Center resident hosted at her place of employment. And spent four and a half hours on asphalt during the most sun-intensive hours of a day that was within one degree of being the hottest for its date in sixty years of South Bend history.

Without sunscreen.

You idiot! you say. Yup. I don't currently even own sunscreen; ordinarily I spend so little time in the sun preserving my ivory pallor that I don't need it. And yesterday I paid for it. And last night. And this morning. And right now.

My shoulders are on FIRE. Yesterday when I left the parking lot I smelled faintly of bacon, from my own skin cooking in the UV rays. I had trouble sleeping last night; the pain kept waking me up. I've felt faintly nauseous.

Now, if I don't die of sun poisoning (which I strongly doubt I will), in a few days I'll have a gorgeous base tan. Currently, however, my ponytailed hair where it touches the back of my neck feels as warm as though it spent time in the microwave.

I'm like a space heater of strawberry-ice-cream-colored skin.

at last

God bless the clinics who serve the low-income and badly insured of our nation. And God bless no-nonsense doctors who don't treat you like an idiot.

So the doctor who saw me this morning was first of all really old, second of all very complimentary as to my personhood -- intellect, appearance, and clean-cut lifestyle (can you believe it?) -- and thirdly supportive of my request for antidepressants. I even got samples!

So now begins my medicated quest for a mentally stable existence.

And the nurse who saw me to the exam room was extremely friendly and gave me her phone number and wants to be my friend.

This week has been totally bizarre.

And, despite 10.5 hours of sleep yesterday, today still finds me groggy and exhausted. But hopefully that will all be over soon.

Hallelu Yah.

soon (hopefully)

So I've been falling apart. The teller is that nothing should really be that wrong, aside from the usual loneliness. My life is great.

It's just this chemical imbalance in my brain and body that's causing me to absorb too much seratonin, making it impossible for me to pull myself up by my bootstraps. I need medication.

Laura has this great analogy that she told me on Sunday: Taking antidepressants is like wearing glasses. It's correcting an imbalance that you were born with, that you cannot do anything about.

Anyway, I'm all about antidepressants (I was on them three years ago), and after trying multiple avenues today -- calling different doctors and organizations -- and running up against a wall each time, I finally fell back on my family practice (that I've only been to once...another thing that sucks about relocating to a totally new area is having no idea where to go for medical needs) and told the receptionist that while it's more common for a family physician to refer a patient to psychiatric care, no one can take me until the end of the summer and I really need help now.

So I have an appointment on Friday morning.

Here's hoping.

too much

I finally got ahold of the psychiatrist's office recommended to me. And they are taking new patients...but they can't get me in until August. And they had no referrals for anyone taking patients any earlier.

So, on the one hand, yay, I'll get help. On the other hand, crap, August is a long way away. (Explain to me how this makes sense. Crazy person calls doctor and says, I need help. Doctor says, Great! We'll see you in three months. I mean, Crazy Person needs help NOW. What is Crazy Person supposed to do in the meantime?)

Getting through the day is hard. I have a depleted will, drive, and capability to do anything taxing. It's hard enough dragging myself through the routines of my day. And I'm terrified that I'm going to start sucking at my job. And I hate, I hate that my joy in what I do and believe in just isn't there.

So. There's that. There's the fact that I'm exhausted and my eyes hurt from the one-day trip to PA and back this week. There's the fact that I'm driving back to PA this weekend (which I'm happy to do; it's my sister's graduation, hooray for her!!).

And there's the fact that I can only do so much for myself. I'm trying to cope. It's difficult.

My favorite ways of dealing with depression:

1. Spend as much time with people as possible, or as little, depending on my need and mood.

2. Watch a lot of soothing movies that just make me happy when I have to be alone. For example: Monsters, Inc.; Spirited Away; Lilo & Stitch; 10 Things I Hate about You; My Neighbor Totoro. Yes, heavy on the Disney and Miyazaki. Miyazaki in particular is pure joy.

3. Take it easy on myself when possible. I haven't cleaned my apartment thoroughly in a couple of weeks. I just can't. I'll have to make myself eventually; but for now, I'm just letting it be. (I cleaned the bathroom last night, and swept the floors. That's a good start.)

4. Do something radically out of character that is also good for me. This time around I'm training for a triathlon in July. The exercise is amazingly good for my mood, and it's toning muscles and making me feel better about my health and appearance. Plus it's something I've never done before, which makes me feel like I'm being proactive in doing something new and beneficial, and it has no negative triggers for me.

5. Take ruthless advantage of the "self check-out" lines in the grocery stores, when I have to go foraging for food and don't want to interact with strangers.

6. Oh yes, this is my favorite: Buy and read a lot of trashy romance novels. I did this all through college (and in a fit of guilt kept throwing them away), but they're all so ridiculous and predictable and end happily, and it's good escapism.

7. Write. I've been picking through old stories on my GCC laptop, and thinking about taking up an old writing project. It channels me somewhere else for awhile, where all my experiences have artistic meaning, which makes up for the fact that without the completed picture which I can't know, my experiences lack existential meaning.

Sigh. I need a vacation.

pupdate

Huzzah, Duke is spending MUCH less time outside...so much less that I feared for half the morning yesterday that he'd been confiscated. But then I heard his energetic barking as he spent a pleasant, sunny hour out of doors around noon.

Better yet, I talked about it with Slightly Psycho Kevin yesterday, and he said that last week he spoke with the neighbors and in his nice-on-the-outside-but-watch-out way told them that if they didn't look after their dog better, someone was going to have to make the call to Animal Control. So unless he rats me out (you never know with SPK), they probably think he did it.

Now of course if they were to ask me if I made the phone call, I'd own up to it. I did it for a reason. But in the meantime it's nice to think I can still probably take him for walks without them hating me.

The saga of the dog a door down

Sometime in December or January my next-door neighbors got a dog.

Allow me to say that this is possibly the cutest dog I have ever seen. Thanks to a self-absorbed horror of a Doberman who followed hard and badly on the heels of my childhood's Perfect Dog, I thought I hated the species. This adorable youngster made me realize otherwise. We fell completely in love, through the fence -- like Pyramus and Thisbe.

His name, I learned from the neighbors, is Duke -- a dumb name, but you can't have everything. (I'd have named him Brutus.) Duke is a Chow-German shepherd mix, with a shepherd's build and short coarse coat, a chow's head and black tongue, a shepherd's patterning on the head, and a chow's reddish coloring. His large triangular ears stand perkily alert and his head, usually cocked to the side, and intelligent fun-filled eyes give him a rascally look.

At first I was cautious about him -- he barks ferociously at every passerby through the chain-link fence that holds him in his dirt yard -- but one day as I shut the door of my car in the driveway (which I share with Duke's owners) I noticed his tail waving. So I approached him, and he jumped eagerly to brace his front paws on the fence, and we introduced ourselves.

After that we established a routine -- I go over to pet him and say hi every time I come home. Then I started taking him for an occasional walk, which brought him massive amounts of joy, and brought me massive amounts of muscle aches the next day because he's so young and eager and pulls so hard on the leash. (He's only ten months old. Just a puppy.) And eventually he was happier to see me than he was to see his owners. We arrived home from work at the same time one day, and both approached the fence...and Duke came dashing over to me. I was a little embarrassed, a little happy.

But all these months I've been troubled by the way he's kept. Obviously he's not ill-treated in any emotional way -- he's the happiest, most outgoing, loving dog on the planet. But through the harsh days of South Bend's winter, snow, ice, and wind; and through the hot days of early spring; and through the past two weeks of frigid rain, he's always outside. And he has no shelter. The neighbors put him outside and leave all day for work, while Duke sits huddled miserably as close to the house as he can get. He has no doghouse, no access to the garage. And when the weather got legitimately hot a few weeks ago, he had no water. His food is usually dumped on the ground. His only toys are sections of a chewed-up garden hose.

I've been struggling internally with the right course of action for a long time. When I began taking an active interest in the dog, such as walking him, I noticed that he stopped being left outside all night, like he used to. But even so, he's outside from 8-12 hours every day, with no way of getting out of the weather. I asked around and learned that it's the law to provide your dog with a shelter raised off the ground if it spends the majority of its time outside. I bought a bucket and filled it with water to put inside the yard for him (and all the while he drank -- thirstily -- he watched me and waved his tail), hoping the neighbors would take the hint, but instead they took away the bucket.

This week was the last straw. The weather has been in the upper thirties and lower forties, and pouring down rain for the past four days. And through it all this poor dog has been sitting outside. It made me mad. So I called Animal Control to report it.

I didn't term the case anything at all; I just said to the woman who answered the phone that I needed to talk to someone about my neighbors' dog, who spent most of his time outdoors in all weather without shelter or water. She said, "You need to give us the address, ma'am: That's a neglect case, and a priority call." So I complied and requested to be kept informed: "If he winds up being taken away, I'd like to help find a good home for him. I'm really attached to this dog." She took my number and said she'd do what she could; it wasn't standard procedure. She also said they'd send someone out right away.

And they did. About an hour later I saw the Animal Control van parked outside the house. No one was home, but Duke was in the yard as described, and as I left to go grocery shopping (yes, I finally did that, too), I saw an official-looking paper stuck in their door.

So they've got their warning informing them of what legally they're required to do. I assume they'll have an eye kept on them.

I don't want them to take the dog away. I want him to be treated well, and I want to keep taking him for walks. If I could take this dog myself, I certainly would. But if it takes him getting a new and better home, that's fine.

I don't particularly like the sensation of ratting on my neighbors -- that's why I've been silent so long -- but I can't stand seeing him cold and miserable and huddled in a little ball when it's cold and wet, or collapsed in the shade panting without a drink when it's hot. So I did something about it. And maybe now things will change a bit for him. I notice that he's not outside at all this cold wet afternoon.

you gotta open up your heart

Yeah, I'm not all that okay.

Hence the lack of blogging -- everything seems lackluster. I have no motivation to do anything that I usually enjoy doing -- reading, writing, blogging, cleaning, watering my plants. I lagged behind in my bills this month (something I've gotten meticulously out of the habit of doing). I haven't done laundry in forever. I hate being alone in my apartment. I'm grumpy with my cat. I'm not sleeping well. I'm gaining weight. I feel a general sense of tired, hollow sadness. I long to spend a lot of time with people I know, but I'm ashamed to talk about what's going on in me, this relentless feeling of ill-being and an inability to function at the higher levels. And I'm terrified of being with people I don't know. Last night I was supposed to go to a dinner for work, but at the last minute I had to go by myself, and I freaked out and started crying. (My boss kindly excused me from going. I felt like a heel.) I haven't gone grocery shopping in two weeks because I can't face the thought of being in company with so many strangers at the store.

This is not like me in the least. Some of my coworkers are a little surprised -- "But you're so outgoing," said Jess. I know. This isn't me. This is horrible. And I don't know what triggered this tailspin, so I need to talk to someone who can a.) figure me out and b.) give me medicine to mitigate the effects of depression.

So it's going to get fixed. I will not live like this any longer. I need help. My boss gave me the number of a reputable psychiatrist, and I'm waiting for a call from them today to set up a new patient interview.

This sucks. But something's gotta give -- and I've been here before, and I know it gets better. With help, it gets better.

The good thing about my morning was that I got to share a little excitement about the Psalms with a resident (we call them guests) at the Center who is just starting to read the Bible. And it was fantastic to remember that the Word of God does not return to him empty, and that other people are touched by it, too.

what I'm looking for

I know the posting has been spotty...this great, heavy, soggy apathy has been smothering my desire to communicate, even as it enhances my sense of isolation. Lovely, yes? Oh -- no.

So, in a comment on the Fab Females blog, I one day, off the cuff, spelled out what I'm looking for in a man. It struck me today as a pretty incredible description, all the more so because I know someone who fits that bill. Despite the fact that he is somewhat unavailable (for the time being, anyway), the fact that this man actually exists bodily in the world I live in gives me tremendous amounts of encouragement and hope.

Here he is in a nutshell:

The man I'm looking for is a man of God, dedicated to truth and justice, who treats others the way Christ treated others, who hates hypocrisy, and who knows the clear, hard, just, and merciful nature of love. Who knows his purpose and strives to live toward it. Who loves equally the successful businessperson and the homeless derelict. Who treats all human beings, including his family, with dignity and respect. Who pursues his goals with unshaken focus and seeks to live an effective life in our broken world.

Yup. I have met a person like this. He's not too good to be true. (And this is in no way intended to slam any of the guys I know. I love almost all of you.) He also has a hot temper and the (at least as far as I've observed) unheard-of ability to live in a bad day without somehow involving you in its badness. Add innate confidence, a well-rounded sense of humor, a love of literature, aesthetic taste, and a feel for good irony, and you've got him.

In short, I think he's great. Available or unavailable, for now or ever, notwithstanding. He fuels my hope for a good future.

Wild.

making waves

Radio waves!

Yesterday saw the annual Homeward Bound 5K walk to end homelessness in South Bend, IN. Several of my coworkers and I were present to walk, and partway through a gentleman just ahead of us turned and asked us if we'd like to go on the air for the radio station he was representing when he did his twenty-minute check-in.

Of course we said, YES! So he handed the phone off to me, and I got to explain the point of the walk, saying something like, "We're walking through some neighborhoods right now, and looking at the lovely houses really drives home the point of what we're doing. Hundreds and hundreds of people in our own community don't have a roof over their heads or a place to call home on any given day in the year. The average age of a homeless person in America right now is nine years old, and we're walking to raise money to make sure people have a safe place to raise their families."

The dude's general manager called a few minutes later to say how clear I sounded. Anyway, the guy works for a Christian radio station that reaches around 30 counties, and I was terribly excited to make the contact. The Center for the Homeless, not itself a faith-based organization, is working more this year to establish connections with faith-based organizations, which basically exist to help such places as ours.

So hopefully we have a new business relationship -- and I got to hand out, for the first time, my very own card!

So the summer finds me getting more excited about my job, and loving what I do here and why I do it. Which is good, because I just signed a two-year lease for my apartment this weekend.

bryter now

At least for the time being.

As I said in my comment to the last post (in response to the great input I received), I realized that one of the things that was crushing me the most was the sense of helplessness. And I'm NOT helpless.

So the new strategy is to spend as much time with people as possible. Wednesday night I hung out with the inestimable ThisWomanAlphabetical, yesterday I invited my two favorite coworkers over for lunch, and last night I watched Bon Voyage with MP's French class and then drove over (the reopened!!!) Douglas Road to eat colorful, cold roast vegetable loaf and exchange stories about how tired we were.

It's essentially a matter of being proactive and collaring the people I want to befriend, without hanging back from fear of rejection or looking pathetic. I NEED people. Therefore I will hunt them down. If they hate me, fine; I'll find people who don't. But most people don't hate me.

Plus I have been suddenly blessed with peace over a complicated situation with a guy I know (sorry for the vaguery; perhaps I'll spill more beans layter), and am reminded that I am very capable of bouncing back and recovering from the things that make me sad.

And I'm going to a cookout this weekend! Wheeeee!

Not again...

I've been slipping back into depression.

I've been trying hard to deny it -- I went through two summers of pretty intense therapy toward the end of college to work my way out of it, and I have never wanted to be back here again. But there are certain signs I can't ignore anymore. Pervasive listlessness. Constant exhaustion. Emotional numbness. Indifference toward things that usually make me very happy (hanging out with people, going for walks, reading, even cooking). Lack of energy. A feeling of purposelessness or pointlessness. Poor sleeping. Failed appetite.

I don't know exactly what triggered this slide. Spring is usually a bad time for me -- it's when my sister was at her worst state of health, and when relationships with my family members were tense at best. And depression runs in my family. But I thought I had more or less conquered it. I guess the most consistent thing that has been eating at me since November is my aloneness. I'm far from family. After living here for almost two years, I've only made a scattered handful of friends. My daily existence doesn't matter much to anyone -- I'm not essential, not in the sense that I'm constantly needed, but in the sense that my presence can be assumed by someone. So I'm young, I'm single, I don't have a strong support system in the place where I'm living, and it's really, really hard to meet people here.

And it's getting me down. I spend almost every day on the verge of random, senseless tears. I've been getting hot flashes again. Nothing I do seems to have a whole lot of meaning. And I really, really don't want to live in this state of blankness again. I want to be the old, happy, strong me.

My health insurance isn't that great, so I can't afford therapy. Though -- if it doesn't start to improve soon, I'm going to take steps to get a therapist anyway. I'd rather be emotionally healthy with an even slimmer budget than try to plod alone through a life that for no good reason looks completely gray.

Prayers are much appreciated. In college I had so many friends to come around and support me and be a web of loving presence while I put myself back together. Here I have only a few, and I hate being a downer and a burden.

What to do? It's especially annoying because my life is great. I have a great job, a great apartment, a decent church, and some really great friends. And I still feel so horrifyingly, chokingly alone. I can't stand it.

Poop.

Passage of Time

The new kitchen clock with its
circle of red shocks the walls
into purpose and order.

The hazy apartment sharpens
around the iambic tick
that whispers in each room

measuring the sleepy silence of
a faded house in a neighborhood
where the grass spikes
through the cracked concrete in the street.

Last night brushing my teeth
I stiffened and shut off the water
thinking the cat was rustling plastic
or someone was creeping inside

but the regularity of sound
was only the clock
telling me it was nearly eleven

and I had wanted to be in bed
at ten. I turned on the kitchen light
to see it:

red rim with an analog face
that showed the white walls
to be a little yellow.

The cat came to rub against my ankles.
His purr rattled under the clock voice
singsong, surgent like waves.

the fifth season

Every morning when I open my eyes to a sunny spring day in South Bend, I ask myself two questions:

1. Will it be warm out today?
2. Which roads will be closed?

See, there's this fifth season squeezed into the year, sometime between spring and summer (and often stretching through all calendar seasons, refusing to die). Construction season.

I've never lived in a place as haywire for tearing roads apart as South Bend. There's never any announcement. You get in your car and drive along a main thoroughfare, in the happy yet stupid assumption that all will be today as it was yesterday, and suddenly there are orange signs, detours, road blocks, heavy vehicles, and men in green and yellow vests milling around appearing important but really doing nothing.

You curse. You follow the detour. Sometimes even the detours have detours. And the repairs -- or whatever it is they're doing (looking for gold?) -- take weeks.

Suddenly your five-minute commute to work takes fifteen. Or your fifteen-minute drive to a friend's house takes twenty-five. Traffic is always terrible. The word "detour" seems to inspire mass confusion among the majority of fellow drivers. They inch along the detour roads, as if afraid of missing the next prominent orange detour-with-an-arrow sign, or as if afraid to trust that the sign really will get them where it promises. You ride people's bumpers. You catch a lot of red lights. You scream.

It does familiarize you quickly with alternate routes to anywhere. You look up and see that familiar orange-and-white barrel and make an instant turn to Plan B. Anything to avoid the detour.

I feel that every citizen of this community deserves a flyer in his or her mailbox. With a calendar detailing each road and intersection that will be closed, and for how long. That way we don't walk out of our homes and blunder into an urban jungle of broken concrete and cranes.

cookbook queen

Lately I've been bored and restless. Things at work have mostly calmed down from the auction (although I'm still recovering from the stress -- shown mostly by an increased irritability, joy for my coworkers), building community is still taking its time, and with summer coming up, my grad student friends will jettison themselves from South Bend as quickly as they can. So a thinned out social scene awaits me in the next few months, and singleness is, at the least, a further source of boredom. (There's no one to call and say, "Let's go for a walk!" who has to come and walk with me.)

So I did the only thing a girl with a penchant for most things culinary can do.

I bought five new cookbooks.

This is a very logical act. While working on "fitting in" and building a life here, over which I only have so much control, I don't have many new interesting things to do, and often very few people with whom to spend my daily life; and lacking the money to dine out on the exquisite food I enjoy eating, I have to fall back on making it myself. So cooking good food is an easy (or challenging!), enjoyable to way give my life a little flavor, relatively cheaply.

One of the most important aspects of cooking, for me, is not falling into a rut or getting bored. For the past three weeks just before grocery shopping day, I've been thinking, What do I want to eat?...and coming up blank. I flip through all my recipes and they're all so...blah. I'm not in the mood for any of them.

Time for something new. And something new showed up at Borders in the form of: Juices and Smoothies, Mediterranean, Mexian, Spanish, and Jewish cookbooks. I've done nothing for the past two days but read all the recipes and bookmark the ones I want to try.

I'm insanely excited to restock my cupboards and buy (a little at a time; I'm still on a poverty income) new accesories to expand my abilities to make such things as tortillas and flan. It's a little taste of something fresh, and a way to broaden my horizons while I lack the capacity to travel the world, or even the area restaurants.

Plus the pictures are pretty. My mouth watered all day paging through them.

forehead pressed against the glass

I'm taking a week's vacation from work, composed almost entirely of flex time from the long weeks I worked before the auction. The first two days I spent lying in bed wrapped in afghans, overcome with some mildly disgusting bout of the flu (mildly disgusting mostly because of the degeneration of my clean apartment -- you just can't wash things when you're sick), but on the whole it's been wonderful to relax and know that they're even listening to my voicemails and checking my email at work, so I don't have an endless string of backlogged communication to pick through when I get back.

I've been thinking about community. At church, and in one of the few decent albums by a Christian artist that I own, I've been hearing things like "my journey is my own" and "It doesn't matter if nobody loves me but Jesus." And in some respects, of course, that's true: We are fully responsible for our own lives, and if we find ourselves utterly friendless, we can count on the love of Christ. But statements like these disregard what I think is an essential principle in the Christian faith, and in human life across the board: community.

We weren't meant to live alone. The human being is a social creature, in constant need of contact with his/her own kind. And for each metaphor of individual race-running and watching oneself that appears in the New Testament, there are two metaphors for community, of coming alongside one another and of being a body (one unit, many parts). When Christ left his legacy to the apostles at his ascension, he founded, not a scattered group of individual mystics who went off by themselves into the wilderness to ponder great things, but a church.

When you look at the "secular" world (if you believe in a secular world; I don't, actually), it's the same: People need other people. Most have some kind of family to fall back on, which they often take for granted. (I've met a lot of people who go back home after college, or never left their hometown, so that they are continually surrounded by family; I think they fail to realize what a hole not having nearby family leaves in the lives of complete transplants like me.) Even some of my coworkers, who don't live close to their families, graduated from Notre Dame and so keep to their old, preformulated communities from college while they live in South Bend.

A dash of the closedness to strangers for which I have criticized the church at large (because the church should be the first place where barriers break down -- it was when it first began, or was challenged to be by recognizing the radical truth that "in Christ there is neither slave nor free, male nor female, Jew nor Gentile"), is present everywhere. People who already have fulfilled their need for a place among others generally aren't looking to include newcomers -- not, perhaps, out of an overt desire to ostracize or exclude, but out of a kind of tunnel vision that results from personal satisfaction: All of my needs are met, so why look further?

I hope that didn't sound at all nasty; it was only an observation. One of my saving graces while I try to settle in and work my way into the already-established communities of the worthwhile and interesting people I've met is the grad school. These are worthwhile and interesting people who are used to a flux in their community as new students enroll and old students leave, so they tend to have a mindset open to incorporating outsiders, newcomers, and loose affiliates.

My other, more permanent saving grace is Meg and Phillip. While rooted among family and longtime friends in their own community, they accepted me with a casual, firm familiarity that reminds me oftentimes of home. I invite myself over; they put me to work, feed me, and take me fun places around the area that I'm still getting to know. They helped me pick out, cut down, transport, and set up my Christmas tree. For several months, although I never actually used it, I had my own toothbrush at their house. We all call me "the second wife." We laugh and horse around and work and bicker like good friends and family do. And the beauty of it is, they're not going anywhere (at least anytime soon, that they've told me). They don't leave for the summer. They're not moving out of town. So they're a kind of above-ground root that I get to lean against.

Not to be all mushy or anything; but a single girl with no family in the area certainly appreciates the niches of belonging that she lands in. Building, or shouldering your way into, a community takes time, and I've only been here twenty months. But it's nice, while I try to put down some roots (this is scary, this roots thing -- I have no particular plans to settle permanently in South Bend, but I also don't have plans to go anywhere else for awhile -- and this weekend I'm signing a two-year lease, which is weird), to have two open places to go where I'm not standing on the outside looking in like a little lost soul.

And I'm off to try to forge some cleanliness out of the disorganized mess that has become my apartment.

Cat Feet

The fog comes
on little cat feet.
(Carl Sandberg)

Clearly Carl Sandberg never lay
prostrate in bed staving off daylight
until a hungry cat cannonballed
his unprotected stomach like a sudden avalanche.

Obviously Carl Sandberg never dragged
the covers over his head, only to suffer
forty careful, cubic pounds per square paw
flattening every cyst and sore chest muscle
creaking each rib and collapsing each lung
to crush him slowly, grindingly awake.

Observation

Through a haze of Sunday cigarettes
and a web of Celtic music
I sip cooled tea and track,
over the rim of the cup that does
not match its saucer,
the Irish server’s gorgeous ass.

His appeal contains some mystery:
His fair hair recedes in wisps
along his skull, though his large
blue eyes and generous mouth
open up his somewhat somber face.
Seen from the side, his tummy
bulges slightly over his belt.

But oh, sweet God, that ass.
It fits into his jeans like breasts
fit into a bra, or an orange
fits into its peel, or air fits into
a balloon. I want to cup my hand
along its curve, to feel the sweep
of buttock into hamstring, to tug
the damp white towel from his left
back pocket and snap it at that
perfect, molded ass—

but his left hand glints with
a simple band of silver,
so I pour another cup of tea,
relax against the wooden bench,
and watch his denimed buttocks,
tea towel swinging, saunter past.

Apartment Living

1. Sights

In early April mourning doves
spiral and surge under the crumbled shingles
above my windows. They throw out
curling flashes of taupe and cream
against the paint-splashed panes
and the cat races from the kitchen
to the living room, trying to follow,
his movements manic, liquid.

On the street squat, balding Jim
in gray sweatpants
unloads laundry and bottled water
from his beige Astro van.
Dark hair swirls around his bald spot
like an iris around a pale pupil.

Coming down the stairs, I see Kevin
trekking toward the rutted alley
with his kayak over his head,
short legs and an oversized hat,
on his way, through the St. Joe River
blanched with sewage gas, to work.

Sometimes I surprise Ted
smoking on the cement patio
with his only friend.
They always stand up and say hello,
two portly, gray-faced men
with pouchy wrinkled eyes and
mustached, gap-toothed smiles.

A month ago a police raid
shrieked through the streets.
From my darkened apartment I peered
through miniblinds at houses
blinking in the savage,
festive beams of blue and red.

2. Sounds

In the kitchen Simon’s clawless paws
thump and patter an intermittent jig
on the cracking linoleum tiles
as he captures his insurgent tail.

On Saturdays Jim’s Hoover
growls and snarls over his carpets
below my living room.
While he listens to Bette Middler
or watches soaps, I put on Ray LaMontagne
or Chris Thile to mute the buzz
crawling up the walls.

Sometimes, late at night, Kevin,
who lectures in Spanish at a local college,
listens loudly to Latin music
in his living room below my bedroom.
I used to stumble down the stairs
and knock on his door in the dark
wearing my green robe and red slippers
to ask, in my saddest sleep-scratchy voice,
for him to turn it down.
Now I cram orange plugs in my ears
and burrow under the covers.

If I stand for long enough in
my quaint and tiny bathroom,
over the small free-standing sink blue
with worn enamel,
I can hear, over the ear-grating hum
of the dying fluorescent light above the mirror,
Ted coughing across the hall.

3. Smells

Opening the shabby brown door,
I step into leftover onion and garlic,
laced with growing plants in dirt
and the faint underlay of cat litter.
Sometimes the kitchen smells
of raw chicken.

When Santos comes to shut off our heat
for the summer, I will tape
garbage bags over the old black
metal register grates and cover them
with bathroom rugs that match the carpet,
to keep out the stale, persistent perfume
of burning cigarettes.

After I pull up the covers and turn off the light,
I can smell Kevin, who keeps weird hours,
cooking. Gourmet vegetarian, organic
garlic, tomato, masala, curry odors pour
through the vent in the wall next to my bed.
I close my eyes and try not to dream of food.

Coming or going, up or down
the dirty, stained stairwell that I share
with Ted, I sometimes smell nicotine, tar,
unwashed old man, ancient cat and
ancient cat piss, and sour unscrubbed breath.
I sometimes smell the full, wet steam
of my shampoo and Dial soap.
I sometimes smell Ted’s sister’s cheap cologne
or the grease from onion-frying beef.

When I push open my sticky, warped windows,
I catch the sharp clean smell of snow,
the smoke of wood-burning furnaces,
the rich awakening of the earth in the yards,
the asphalt taint in rain.
Neighborhood kids of mingled races clamor
in the streets. They climb cars
and dart after balls and spat with sticks.
Through the pavement on the streets,
the red lines of bricks are wearing free.

snacking out

Last night Joan, Laura, Marianne and I had a long-awaited Girls' Night at my place. We intended to watch chick flicks and eat lots of popcorn; we ended up talking and eating lots of chips and salsa con queso, and monkey bread.

All day prior to the get-together, I was reminiscing on the slumber parties of my adolescence, when our parents supplied 5-10 teenage girls with enough junk food to feed the army of Attila the Hun, and we would stay up till 3 or 4 a.m. yakking and drinking caffeinated soda and stuffing our mouths with Doritoes, Cheetoes, popcorn, chips and dip.

So I wanted to provide a feast (perhaps partially in denial of my current poverty -- I can be far more lavish with guests than I can with myself, and it's more satisfying to feed other people anyway), and I did. There were chips & salsa, an enormous veggie spread with ranch dip, baguette (provided by Marianne) with butter or sun-dried tomato spread (which didn't turn out like I'd hoped, but was edible), chocolate chip monkey bread (provided by Laura, and delicious), soda, and wine.

And we couldn't eat it all. I didn't even break out the hummus and babaganouj (I have FINALLY conquered the recipe!) with pita, the popcorn, or the cheeses that Joan brought. And I realized, to my astonished disappointment, that I'm no longer an adolescent. Eating till I burst now means so much less than it used to.

The conclusion: I'M GETTING OLD. Not really. The actual conclusion is, don't buy tons of food for a girl party. Because now I'll be stuck with it for weeks.

BUT the conversation was delightful and fulfilling -- nothing warms my heart like a fellowship of women (unless it's communion with one amazing man -- and I'm something lacking that at the moment, not completely but in part) -- and we're planning to make tracks for a girly shopping trip to Chicago in a week.

At least we didn't run out of food!

2006 Auction: going--going--gone!

The Auction took place a week ago today, and went, I am glad to say, extremely well. We didn't quite make our fundraising goal, but on the whole the event was a brilliant success.

And some quick backstory about the Auction, so you get a little bit of an idea what it was like: It's a big event -- 432 people attend, alongside 100 volunteers, to bid on fully or partially donated packages, the net from the sale of which benefits the Center for the Homeless. Our annual operating budget at the Center hits the 2.4 million dollar mark, and the Auction is our biggest annual event. This year, with the sale of auction items and sponsorships from community businesses, we grossed $260,000.

And I was in charge of running the whole event. Namely, I was in charge of organizing our Auction Committee, comprised entirely of long-time volunteers from around the community. They all know what they're doing, so I didn't have to run anyone's life, but I had to make decisions, network behind the scenes, and do a lot of navigating in what is for me completely uncharted waters. It was thoroughly rewarding work, and of course left me exhausted afterward.

The particular challenge was making this year's auction experience better for everyone than last year's. Last year my boss, Angie, came into her position and had to handle the Auction, with no preliminary experience, three weeks before the event; it was the first year being held at a new venue; and it was the first year using a new brand of auction software to make keeping track of sales easier (but, since it was the first year, it wasn't easier at all).

I was lucky in that the second year of doing something new is bound to be easier than the first, and in that I had Angie to coach me along the entire way; but something also made everyone on the Auction Committee, and the other Center staff who worked their arses off to pull this off, very relaxed. The day before the Auction we all set up at the Palais Royale, and it was entirely low-key. So was the day of the Auction. And that -- everyone's chill, roll-with-the-punches attitude -- is what makes me think I did a good job.

So I've been putting in 60-90 hour work weeks the past month, and I took a three-day-weekend this time around, and midway through April I'm taking off a week just in flex time. I'm looking forward to it greatly.

The Woman Warrior

Tonight the University of Notre Dame opened a three-day conference celebrating 25 years of the democratic Chinese magazine Today. I attended with Marianne, Joan, and Laura Farina for a wine and sushi reception (fabulous), and to hear readings from one of my literary idols, Maxine Hong Kingston.

She was wonderful. She was pointed out to me while I sat in the atrium of McKenna Hall trying to identify the most polite way to eat a sushi roll: a petite woman in a black-and-white striped dress with shoulder-length gray-white hair pinned back at the side in cute little clips, standing with her back to me about seven feet away. I watched her greet the people she knew with hugs and thought, Ohhh she's nice. (It's lovely to see in person a favorite writer who is nice.)

And her readings were superb. She stood just a head above the lecturn in the cozy auditorium and told funny stories about her writing career (which began with a funny poem she made up when she was two, hanging out a second-story window from her mother's hands, greeting her great-uncles coming toward them in a coach drawn by a pair of black horses). And she read exerpts from her work. This is the thirtieth birthday of The Woman Warrior, and in the thirty years since its publication, Maxine discovered some errors (or omissions) in her representations of the myths of Fa Mu Lan and Ts'ai Yen, which she corrected (or added) in her readings. She has a low, easy voice and a relaxed presence. Her reading voice is excellent. And her passion for peace is both inspirational and contagious.

I left wanting to read everything she's written, and kicking myself for not bringing my copy of The Woman Warrior for her to sign. And as we filed out of the auditorium, I found myself walking right behind her.

I touched her shoulder and thanked her for presenting, and said, "It was an honor to hear you."

She squeezed my arm and said with a big, warm smile, "Thank you -- I love your coat! Pink -- so appropriate." (My pink spring coat coincided neatly with her concluding remarks on pink as the color of peace.)

Then she went to the table to sign books, and I wandered out into the frigid South Bend early spring night, happy happy happy.

If you haven't read Maxine Hong Kingston, please do. Not only is she brilliant and amazing and powerful in her works, she's also gracious and endearing.

So glad I went. So glad.

a day with Meg

Yesterday morning I had to go with my coworker Mary to set up a display for the Auction at the mall. Yes, folks, the mall where I drudged my life away for nine months on two minimum-wage, benefitless jobs.

I was unprepared for the strength of my reaction to that consumeristic, soulless place. I had, consciously, to wipe the disgust and revulsion and resentment off my face when we came out of the dingy back hallway into the main area of the mall. It actually took courage.

I didn't realize till yesterday that I really was miserable for a good deal of the time last year. And now, when things are going so incredibly, unbelievably, unexpectedly well, and I don't have to brave my way through everything, I can say, Man that sucked.

I mean, don't get me wrong. God was there, all the way through it. The ladies at Ann Taylor (none of whom work there anymore; the wonderful women who took me in as a surrogate daughter and sister have been replaced by toothy, snotty sharks who only want your dollars -- if they can tell right off the bat that you have dollars) gave me a place and a kind of family. But I was under several burdens, constantly and simultaneously: feeling inadequate in a sales job; feeling pressure to bring in more money or lose my job (this was from the upper management, not the management in my store); feeling despair at having to work so hard doing something that my personality and field of education didn't suit me to do.

So when I walked out of the mall after my three-hour table-sitting shift, I felt slightly sick -- poisoned, even. (The only upper was buying an ADORABLE mug at Gloria Jean's.) And on the way home, out of the blue, I called The Meg Formerly Known as Boss and audaciously invited myself to her charming house in Michigan for the afternoon. (It's harder to invite a married couple over to my small apartment when they have a real house with things like yardwork to do on Saturdays, when on Saturdays the height of my activity is maybe walking the dog next door.) So I drove up to Michigan -- and every time I drive to their house, even after eight months, I still need a refresher on directions; the generally decent map in my head abandons me when I cross the Michigan border -- and we went antiquing.

Antiquing was the perfect antidote to the mall. We poked around stalls in this big warehousey low-ceilinged building exclaiming over chairs, glassware, pots, lamps, chests, benches, stained glass windows. I fell in love with an old unstained kitchen chair, carved for comfort. And the woman who waited on me at checkout gave me a stranger's unexpected high praise. She asked if I were a student, and when I said no, she said, "Oh, let me guess what you do. I like doing this. Hang on -- I'm trying not to stare -- you're really lovely, you have wonderful teeth -- okay, let me guess what you do..." And she guessed wrong (lawyer's assistant), but when I told her my real job, she said, "Oh, you'd be really good at that, you have this warmth about you, it draws people. Some people give off this vicious vibe, but you're not vicious." And in the process of ringing me up, she found out I was funny to boot, and when Meg and I left she called after me, "Good luck, you're wonderful!"

It was a little crazy, but really nice. It purged the mall-poison from my system.

So then Meg and I went home and had an excellent dinner with Meg's husband Phillip (grr, I can never remember if I'm spelling his name right, I hope that's it -- Philips/Phillips are as picky as Sarahs/Saras when it comes to spelling), and then we went to see the local high school's production of The Wizard of Oz for which Meg and Phillip had done a lot of set work, and which Phillip was stage-managing. It was insanely cute, and the show was completely stolen by the cutest little four-year-old girl Toto anyone has ever seen. At several points there were at least twenty people onstage doing well-rehearsed dance numbers, and all eyes in the audience were fixed on this sweet little Toto doing her enthusiastic, unselfconscious level best to follow along. I kept whispering to Meg, "I can't take it. I want one."

So it was charming, and the set work, despite Meg's disappointment with the final result, was great. Oo and the Oz costume was amazing -- modeled after Western Native American dance costume, it featured a huge, frightening mask head on a frame several feet above the actor's head, from which flowed long loose robes, making Oz look enormous. There were also creepy metal claw-hands. Fantabulous.

It actually makes me want to see the Judy Garland version again. I haven't wanted to see that, even remotely, in ages.

So it was a good day. And tonight I'm planning on attending a Chinese lit conference at Notre Dame, and tonight's program features Maxine Hong Kingston reading some of her work -- I'm outrageously excited.

spammers

Okay, I mean come on. Who invents these names that show up in my bulk folder?

Today a guy named Castillo Harvey sent me a spam. Then there was Napoleon Huddleston and apparently his brother Jarold Huddleston who both wanted to tell me about tickets they say I'm being billed for.

Who has names like this? Who even invents names like this?

Ridiculous.

In other news, as the Auction nears, I'm surprisingly calm. I had a meltdown week last week, and my favorite guy friends were insanely nice and supportive, and this week when I'm doing fine they don't seem quite to know what to do with me. We've hung out and had good times, but sometimes they just seem...puzzled. "So, you're doing okay?" "Oh yeah, I'm doing fine now. Everyone says things are coming together well, so I decided to believe them." "Oh...good -- that's good." (Maybe they think I'm an insane woman, freaking out one week and blithely fine the next.)

But the thing is that the meltdowns tend to be few and far between. Ordinarily, I'm really fine. Sometimes I half-wish I were consistently broken, just because it seems to motivate men so much to try to make it better, to be there, and they make the greatest companions. And I grant you that I'm pretty lonely. But I can't fake that I'm doing poorly, when I'm usually doing fairly well.

I'm not sorry I'm doing well; I was broken for awhile, and I don't miss it. I do wish that I could find a way to be close to men without having big problems for them to try to fix. My only big problem is that I'm lonely and want someone to share life with, day by day. But how do you tell someone that? (Although I'm starting to.) So, usually when they ask how I'm doing, I say, "Fine -- yeah, everything's fine."

When it's kind of not...I mean, my life is great. I have a great job, great cat, great apartment, great friends, and I really feel like I'm settling in. But I keep coming back to the bare, bald fact that when I consider what I most want in life, it's a family. And I have no control over acquiring one. I have to wait.

But even with the frustration, the loneliness, the yearning, the hunger for intimacy in all its forms, I'm still not broken. And often that seems to drive the good men away. Like I don't need them. When I do need them. Not to fix me, not to save me, not to complete me; but to live alongside me and love me and see me.

Bah, it feels corny to be complaining about it. It'll happen, when I'm not clutching for it. I know this.

So it's a matter of cultivating contentment, a matter of time, and a matter of enjoying the people I know right now, while I have them. Everything will fall into place eventually. Everyone says so, so I think I'll believe them. (Because "all shall be well, and all shall be well, and all manner of thing shall be well.")

Right?

Right.

overwork and odd bumps

I put in about 65 hours last week.

The next couple of weeks leading up to the auction are going to consume my life. This isn't of course bad -- it's like a strange combination of production week and finals week -- but I'm going to be exhausted by the end. The night itself will, I think, be quite fun.

Poor Simon spends so much time alone that he goes primordially insane when I walk through the door. He tears around the house making brrrrrrrt! noises and leaping out from behind furniture to bat madly at my ankles when I walk past. Lately our favorite game when I'm getting ready for bed involves him ferociously attacking my hands through the shower curtain while he sits in the bathtub. (When he sees the bare skin of my hands, however, he immediately desists and rubs against my fingers and starts purring.)

And I have this odd lump on the back of one of my vertebrae -- it doesn't seem to be attached to the bone, is slightly squishy, and hurts like hell, probably because I've been performing contortionist exercises to prod at it. My acupuncturist says it looks like a fatty nodule and needs an eye kept on it.

I'm freaked out and scared. What is it and why is it there? Is it dangerous? Should I get it looked at? What if I need some major surgery? What if it's cancer? Why does it hurt so much?

Prayer, please. I know I may be a little of an alarmist, but when it comes to my health, I really really like things to be normal. And this isn't normal.

new things

This week kicks off our "Biggest Loser" competition among the staff at work. Twelve people are participating, and there's a nice reward pot for whoever wins.

I'm excited to do this. Now, I know I don't techincally have a weight problem, but I've been steadily putting on the pounds over the past year, and I don't like it. I know with absolute confidence that I will not win the "Biggest Loser" prize, but I look forward to the camaraderie of working with other people to establish healthy patterns of eating and excercise, which will hopefully outlast the 4-month competition and continue into my future.

So yesterday I went for a brisk long walk through sopping spring snow (the snow actually completely covered my glasses and soaked my coat), and today I plan to implement a new two-hour lunchbreak plan, where I still come in at seven and leave at five instead of four. This way I can take a nice walk during my lunch, shower if necessary, eat, relax, and head back to work. (This is the closest to a "siesta" that I can get this side of the Altantic.)

And now I have to roll up my sleeves about the Auction. I'm starting to stress about it. It's a huge task, I've never done anything like it before, and there are so many different tasks that I need to do that it's difficult to stay organized. BUT I have to have faith in the God who put me here, and who equipped me for it -- I don't have to do this alone.

And that's the other thing -- I feel like this weekend contained the perfect balance of companionship and solitude. I hung out with MP, chilled with some of the most fun of the grad students at her apartment for sweeping rounds of Balderdash and Bullshit (both of which I sweepingly lost, but it was oh-so-much fun), and Sunday was church and much-needed shoe shopping, and then an afternoon of trying to take a nap while Simon jumped on my head, and an evening of movie-watching by myself while I figured out my menu and grocery list for the week, and finished paying off my bills. (Ugh.)

So it was good. No matter how well I sleep on Sunday nights, it's never enough for Monday morning, but I'm going to keep this nice past weekend close to mind as a landmark of sanity when everything starts to go crazy...starting in about ten minutes when I have a meeting to figure out what we're putting in the program, get the program text written, figure out volunteer contact information to go into the program, and various and sundry other panic-related things as we all completely wig out.

But it's going to be okay -- by and by. I really need to keep the stress under control. When I don't, it keeps me from falling asleep, seeps into my dreams when I finally do drift off, wakes me up from the dreams to continue worrying, and brings my menstruation on early. (Oh yes. Some girls skip their period when they're stressed; mine comes sooner. So lucky.)

SO, I have a strict don't-think-about-it-when-you're-not-at-work policy. Which has been working so far. But we'll see, when the poo finally hits the fan. In five minutes.

Here's to relying on grace!

a great week

So, after all the angst and misery and anguish of last week, this week was splendid.

It all started, surprisingly and ironically, of course, with church. After tearful conversations on the phone with various people of various degrees of understanding, MP said, "Sarah, come with me to Calvary Temple. Just this Sunday." And I, who left this church at the beginning of last autumn, and who normally decline MP's invitations to go back, said, "Yes, okay."

It didn't cross my mind not to go. And the entire service was unbelievable. I sat there stunned, thinking, this is God gently telling me that it's okay. That everything is okay. And that there's a place for me.

Because the pastor, just after a great worship service, stood up and said, "The word of the Lord today is one word. It's two syllables. The first syllable is re." And I thought, oh-the-second-syllable-is-PENT-okay-I-should-probably-repent-of-my-bad-attitudes, and then the pastor said, "And the second syllable is lax."

And I sat back and thought...oh. Oh.

And the sermon, preached by my favorite pastor at this church, addressed almost everything that's been important lately. I was challenged, encouraged, and filled with joy. And afterward there was a luncheon for the young adults at the head pastor's home, and MP and I both went, and we met some truly fabulous people. One girl busted out with the occasional "shit" and another was telling me how much she enjoys wine. And I just relaxed and bathed in the company of other, normal, cool, amazing young people who are connected with church.

This doesn't mean that any of my previous complaints no longer have value. They very clearly do. But God took me by the shoulders and showed me that the whole thing is not hopeless. And I basked in the "God-afterglow," as MP calls it, for the rest of the week.

The Miracle Auction that I'm running at work is three weeks away. There's so much to do. And this week I wasn't going crazy with stress. I just did what I needed to do. A few coworkers for whom I care greatly are undergoing various extremely stressful personal scenarios, and instead of worrying myself sick over them, I prayed. And prayed. And prayed. And was suffused with peace. And overall a vast thankfulness, that God has brought me here, and is still leading me.

The week has had its challenges. Last night I plunged into momentary discouragement, where I was convinced I'd die alone, and started to feel like I felt all through February. But then I said, "No. I'm sick of being depressed. I don't want to feel this way anymore. God is GOOD, and His gifts are GOOD, and they're pouring out more than I had imagined possible." So I relaxed, and chose hope, peace, love, and faith.

And now it's the weekend -- the last free weekend I'll have till after the auction, since work will, starting Monday, overcome my life for the next three weeks. Last night I went to the Fiddler's with two of my favorite coworkers (the only person missing was Meg), and we hung out and told stories and talked, and then I went home feeling that momentary lonely discouragement and instead of wallowing, I baked a pan of cornbread, took a long soak in a tub full of relaxing bath salts, read half of a cheesy romance novel, started a historical exploration of Helen of Troy, and went to bed. This morning I slept in, read, and began cleaning the house. Soon I'll head over to MP's to do laundry and chill, come home to walk the dog next door, and head back to MP's for a game night. Tomorrow is church and an afternoon of relaxation.

A great week. Thank you, Jesus, a great week.

confessions

I feel compelled by the glass of wine I just sipped to be honest.

I'm lonely. Heart-rendingly, agonizingly lonely.

For many reasons. Obviously because I'm still single. But that's a complicated reason. It's not just, oh wahh, no one wants to date me. I've reached this point where a lot of what I do seems utterly pointless because I don't have anywhere to pour out love. For three years now I've shut off my capacity to love, crammed it back in on itself, because loving meant losing myself, and it wasn't healthy, and I've been afraid ever since of loving badly and of not being loved in return and of being horribly hurt because I throw too much of myself into a person or people.

But after three years, not loving anyone is empty. I can be the best person my position has ever seen at work; I can be witty and funny, sparkling, the life of every party (and my friends, that's not an exaggeration...MP and I are a study in being the life of the party); I can smile at everyone I see and genuinely wish them a good day...But without loving anyone or anything, it doesn't mean anything.

It's 1 Corinthians 13. I haven't been living it. And I'm tired, I'm tired of not living it.

So here I am, all ready to go, ready to love...and I have my family and closest friends, and it's great. But I don't have a significant male other, and I don't have a church.

Church on Sunday sucked. Again. I left feeling more desperately alone and in despair than when I walked in. Again. I can't do this anymore. It's coming to where I want to say that the contemporary church has nothing to say to me or my generation. Has nothing relevant to bring to our lives. And it's pathetic. It's wrong. I WANT to belong to a church; I've been wanting it badly for over a year. But of the three churches I've attended with any degree of regularity, none of them have contained people who exhibited genuine interest in getting to know me. At one, I was hit on by a certain Wretched Tim, and he was the only one who wanted to spend time with me (and you can bet it wasn't for my sparkling wit or big heart); at the second, I was held at a distance with false smiles; at the third and current, I'm basically ignored.

Why? Why? Two weeks ago as I was walking out, I shook the pastor's hand, as I have every week since I started attending regularly in November (well, I sort of skipped December, but November, January, and February were regular months), and he asked me if I was a visitor. And something in me mewled and died.

I can't do this anymore. I don't have to convince the grad students that I've met through MP that I'm worth hanging around. People who have met me in public three times say of me that I have a dynamic presence, that with MP I draw the energy in a room. I don't have to beg them to see that I'm likeable. What the hell is wrong with the church that I have to work harder than I worked even in high school to show people that I have value? People that I've met four, five, six times, and to whom I've been extremely nice and friendly, won't have anything to do with me.

I have to sit down and compose a thoughtful, careful, deliberate essay on why the church's ministry to Christians of my generation sucks. But for now, believe that I hate rolling out of bed on Sunday morning. I hate selecting the nicest, most flattering clothes in my wardrobe. I hate pasting on the nicest, most winning smile in my repertoire so that CHRISTIANS WHO ARE SUPPOSED TO MODEL THE UNCONDITIONAL LOVE OF CHRIST will be nice to me. And I hate doing all this knowing that it won't make a damn bit of difference. Maybe they'll smile and shake my hand, but they won't invite me to lunch. They won't ask for my e-mail or my number. (I had to do all that. Hey, here's my e-mail. Here's my number. Let me know if you're doing anything.)

And most of all, I hate that I can't be myself in church. I hate that I can't talk about my favorite beer or my favorite whisky, I hate that I can't say that my favorite poet is a lesbian, I hate that I can't say, You know that chastity thing? It really sucks sometimes, or that I miss belonging so much I cry myself to sleep sometimes. I hate that I can't say, The concept of "witnessing" is a fallacy. Witness is a state of being. You don't have to cut and paste the name "Jesus" into every other sentence; just be who you are--that's almost always enough.

I hate that I can't jump up and down and point to a verse (because in church one seldom studies the Bible) and say, You know what I love about this?! Look at God's concern for women! Look here!

I hate that I have to slough off everything that matters to me to say, monotonously, God...Jesus...the Bible. Have to spit out all the prefabricated answers they've had us say since Vacation Bible School when we were seven years old. Have to swallow all the doubts, all the questions, all the real, life-changing insights, to talk about utter crap like "courage."

Courage isn't talking to a "non-Christian"; courage is walking into church on Sunday morning. And there's something horribly wrong with that.

There's also something horribly wrong about me sitting here wanting to learn how to love, futilely.

I feel like William H. Macy's character in Magnolia: "I have so much love to give."

What do I do?

End whiny angry passionate blog. More about boring professional rational organized work in the future.

I just want to bang on the drums all day

Actually, if I had my 'druthers, I would read and sleep all day.

So, my job. Is fabulous. Is amazing. Is getting really busy.

My position as Director of Events & Marketing belongs to the Development Team, whose mission, in the simplest terms, is to foster community relationships and so bring in resources (funding, volunteers) to the Center to make it financially and manpoweredly possible for us to help break the cycle of homelessness. I, obviously, manage fundraising events and tell the world about the Center and what we do here. Other members of the Development Team manage the volunteer system, write grants, manage the donations that we receive, and forge/maintain important connections around the community (and that's just a basic start).

At the last Thursday weekly Development Meeting, my coworker Adam (who, I've decided, is truly awesome) announced that he had started coming to work at 7 a.m. This is an hour and a half before most everyone else comes in, and it allows him to get done what he needs to get done before other people come to him with additional requests, so that when they do, he has his schedule freed up enough to do it and not feel overwhelmed by the day.

I thought this was a brilliant idea. Long, long ago I was a morning person. In high school I got up at 4:45 every morning (this was mostly due to the need of four people to use one bathroom). I used to love getting up before the sun rose, so that when it came up, I was ready to greet the new day. Then I went to college and developed this thing called a social life, which required rigorous post-midnight hours, and I stopped getting up in the morning whenever possible. Ever since, I have been trying to free my inner morning person, but with no impetus, it didn't happen.

But this coming in to work at seven was the spark I needed. First, I get to pretty much call my own hours. Which means that I am absolutely free to work 7-4. And four is a great time to leave. There are still a few hours of daylight left, you can do things like grocery shop, work out, and cook dinner and still be able to eat by six o'clock, not eight.

And you can get a handle on the day without the day having a handle on you. Most days I actually have to discipline myself to leave on time; it could easily become a twelve-hour day and I still wouldn't accomplish everything. So when you come in at nine with a list in mind of must-dos, and you already have three messages on your voicemail and ten e-mails asking you to do things, you feel a little violated by the day. You lose a sense of power. By coming in when normal people are waking up, you can neatly avoid all of that, so that when your phone rings and your inbox blinks, you're ready to up and at 'em.

So I started coming in at seven too. I supplied my office with coffee, an electric kettle, and a French press, the product of which I share liberally with Adam and his roommate and fellow co-worker Andrew, who also comes in early on occasion. (We are trying to market ourselves as the young, the driven, and the dedicated, and not the young who have no life outside work.) There's something about coming in while it's dark, turning on my computer, making coffee, diving into work, and having a few minutes to chat with people who appreciate my coffee that makes me bounce out of bed a little faster, and makes me a little more chipper, when the alarm goes off.

Sad, isn't it? One of the highlights of my day is making coffee for two twenty-something men (who both have girlfriends). On the other hand, it's casual, it's relaxed, it's friendly, and it's something to look forward to. My cat, darling as he is, can't appreciate my coffee. And I have, lately, been very much missing a people connection.

This is a fantastic place to work, and being dedicated to a common humanitarian mission, I think, draws us all together in ways other office jobs wouldn't. So in some respects, the people here are like family.

Plus we're here all the time. Driven and dedicated as we might be, we still don't really have lives. But don't tell anyone that.

Adjustments

Yesterday I bought three chick flicks. Aaaah! Why? Why?

Then I came to my senses and went to spend Valentine's Day at Club 23 with the fabulous MP and other (mostly) single grad students. Laughed our heads off. Toasted the day. Went home, slept late, came to work tired.

But when I left for work this morning everything smelled like the faintest beginning of spring, and the pale gray light of the overcast sky was somehow profoundly thrilling. I felt a stab of joy in the pit of my stomach and was so happy to be alive, here, in South Bend, in February, getting into my car alone.

Last week I realized I'm falling in love with South Bend. I couldn't tell you why. There are little things about it -- watching the snow drift like magic along charming Michigan Street in downtown South Bend, sitting in the funky Thyme of Grace cafe in downtown Mishawaka looking out the window on the old brick walls of the outdoor courtyard, driving home after work under a fiery, radiant, red-amber-gold Midwestern sunset where there is SO MUCH SKY and all the building tops of downtown glow like they've been set on fire -- that fill me with joy.

And that's what I've found here -- joy. A joy so fierce it stings my eyes. I love to love where I live, and it's been harder with South Bend than with Grove City -- Grove City was a basic extension of where I'd always lived, minus a Great Lake, while the lay of the Indiana landscape is nothing like where I'd lived before (although a Great Lake is half an hour's drive away -- not bad at all). So it's taken about a year and a half to adjust to the rolling flatness, the quick spurt of spring and autumn, the early sunsets, the extremes of temperature, and the endless slow winters.

I still feel something of an alien in regard to the people -- they're very different from my hardened, curt, abrupt Western Pennyslvania people whose tenderness and compassion are buried deep but all the stronger for the length of time it takes to reach them. Here, where a smile is a penny a hundred and inquiries of "How ARE you?" are more social niceties than actual questions (I'm figuring out that "How are you?" is roughly equivalent to "Hey"), I still feel like a stranger among the inhabitants, although I'm completely awed by their consciousness of and dedication to social need in the area. I'm privy to witness true philanthropy where I work, whereas most people in my birthplace tend to take care of their own, and only their own, and if you have no support system, you're pretty much screwed (but nearly everyone has a support system. The people I know are loyal to their blood family to the death or the last dime). So the people are still taking some getting used to, and I'm still figuring out where I fit in, who likes to smile at everyone but tends to eschew meaningless small talk wherever possible (I think I'm a blend of the places I've lived).

But the land I'm coming to love.

And thank God Valentine's Day is over. I didn't wear black, and I'm glad for my friends who have found someone to love who loves them in return, but it was rougher than I'd anticipated. And I don't like feeling weepy and lost; I like to feel positive and confident in God's provision and grace. And MP was there to laugh, and commiserate, and remind me of what I know to be true -- and of what I don't have to settle for. She's da bomb.

And it's clean, it's fresh, it's over -- the holidays that make me want to kill myself with loneliness are behind me, and spring is getting nearer. And I'm twenty-four. I knew twenty-four was going to be a good year. And it's been great.

and suddenly I was four years old

Yesterday, for whatever reason, was blah. Empty, miserable, bitter, sad. Call it Valentine's Day Eve Doldrums.

Here I am, twenty-four, with a great haircut and a big smile, with excellent cooking skills and a shiningly clean apartment, with energy and enthusiasm, intelligence and education, a sense of humor, a ready laugh, and a heart full of love for almost everything that exists, and I have only my much-beloved kitty to come home to, and only myself to cook for.

Most of the time I am fine with this, because I have been blessed with an enjoyment of my own company, and I have a support system of strong, close friends. And lately I've been devouring books at a pre-college rate, and feeling literarily fulfilled. I look on my life and I love it, I marvel at the miracle that has been carved out for me, I am fiercely glad and thankful for all that is mine.

But yesterday I was sad. I plodded through the day at work, crawled into my car, drove home, and dragged myself up the steps, thinking over and over, No one loves me. And my tiny mailbox was bulging open with one very large Valentine's Day card from my grandma, with "xoxoxo" printed across the top, and a funny letter and a ten dollar bill inside.

And I started crying. Some things grandmas can still fix. And everything felt cleaner, and better.

Chickeny Goodness

So in the past year I've turned into a fantabulous cook. This is quite an "ugly ducking" transformation, since I come from a long line of fantabulous cooks but never cooked anything besides scrambled eggs, boxed mac'n'cheese, Rice-a-Roni, and Ramen until my move to South Bend. Now suddenly I have about seven cookbooks and a passion for homemade, tasty food.

The only problem with fantabulous cookery is that I only cook for myself. I have no problem with settling on the couch with my latest gourmet meal and congratulating myself on the excellent taste while watching Sports Night, but let's be honest, it's far more rewarding to give than to receive, and half the fun of cooking is watching other people enjoy what you've made.

Plus I miss having sit-down meals with other human beings. Growing up, I had dinner with my family every night. Now I have dinner with my television while shooing away the cat with my foot. Do I feel socially fulfilled through my dinnertime experience? Hardly.

So after conferring with MP I decided to solve the problem by hosting a small dinner gathering this past Saturday at my home with our friends Joan, David (the Grover, as we call him, or, if he's under a lot of stress, Morose David), and Peter. I made my all-time favorite recipe handed down from my mother: creamed chicken over biscuits. MP supplied an excellent apple pie.

And everything was perfect. The food was great -- the five of us put away almost three batches of biscuits (which MP declared to have achieved Southern status!) and nearly all of the chicken; and the apple pie clinched this classically American meal. The company and conversation were deeply enjoyable as always, and Simon kept us entertained playing wildly with the plastic milk ring I had pulled off the jug just before making the biscuits.

I believe the consensus was to hold such events more often, on a rotating basis. It's certainly good for one's overall health to have a complete, homemade meal (well, almost complete...I forgot to make a vegetable, but nobody minded. In fact, when I said, "Oh! I forgot the veggie! Do you care?" everyone immediately said, "No!" Sorry, moms; some things we never outgrow) and interaction with other people while one eats. I for one felt entirely satisfied.

Here's to friends, food, and whole cut-up chicken, which is absurdly cheap. And here's to Simon, just for being abominably cute.

BYO Machete

This has nothing really to do with the hilarious (hiwawious) Emerald Nuts Superbowl commercial, although I would like to point out with MP that I want "Eagle-eyed Machete Enthusiasts Recognize A Little Druid Networking Under The Stairs" on a T-shirt. I laughed so hard I was producing dry, bronchial coughs afterward.

No, this post with "machete" in the title has to do with my apartment. In my little, limited square footage in the frozen wastelands of northern Indiana, there exists a jungle.

You might not notice it when you first set foot in the door. You might see a glimmer, a wave of green from the living room as you look down the hallway, but all in all the appearance is quite ordinary: A charming, old-fashioned apartment with a houseplant. Or two houseplants, if you look over your right shoulder into the dimly lit bathroom sporting a pothos on top of the cabinet. Nothing out of the ordinary.

But once you step into the kitchen, you might get an idea. A three-foot rubber plant guards the litterbox next to the refrigerator. A Christmas cactus droops quietly in front of the cookbooks. A nephthytis overshadows the napkins. An enormous dracaena brushes the bottom of the picture frame on the stand by your elbow. A pothos and another, weaker nephthytis loom from the top of the kitchen cupboards. A zebra plant rallies its spikes toward the bright, bare window opposite the sink.

Hm, you think. Well, kitchens are a good place for houseplants. It's bright. It's cheery.

Then you might turn around and peek into the bedroom. A young schefflera stretches toward the sun on the nightstand. A variety of sanseviera flourishes in stiff succulence on the dresser. A enormous cat palm and a stunted majesty palm bristle behind the door. A Janet Craig dracaena darkens the top of one bookcase.

Hm, you think. This woman may be a little odd. I think I'll retreat to the living room.

And that, my friend, is when you realize that you've left Kansas and landed somewhere in Malaysia.

Two huge palms and a thriving ficus dominate one corner. A lemon-lime dracaena and a jade top the entertainment center. A schefflera cutting lingers next to the coffee table. A three-foot "capella gold" schefflera glows under one window. A philodendron and a vast pothos trail from the tops of the bookcases. A cordyline adds a dash of purple to the top of the coffee table. And tucked away in the corner by the computer, a small rubber plant bravely sends up shiny new leaves.

Then you think, this woman is mad.

And you're right. As soon as I moved into my new apartment and fell in love with all the windows (I have two-directional light in every room but the bathroom -- my small, four-room apartment boasts eight windows), I began to cultivate my own rainforest. Call it the longing for a pet (B.C. -- before cat); call it the starvation to be surrounded by living things; call it the never-tamed love of the forest; call it what you will. But I have, to date, twenty-four houseplants, and nearly all of them have names.

I have high hopes for some of them. With proper care, Gregory the ficus could reach six feet (yes, my friends, it's a tree. They're going wild in Florida...fifty feet or more. You can't plant them outside anymore there; it's illegal). So could Cecil the "Capella Gold" schefflera and Maud the green schefflera. I'm defying odds with Sylvia the schefflera cutting (if you wonder why I love scheffleras, look them up, they're lovely -- they're also called Hawaiian umbrella trees), since they're supposed to be very difficult to propogate from stem cuttings. She's not thriving, but she's surviving. We'll see what happens. I've seen lemon-lime dracaenas and sansevieras reach enormous heights, so Cedric and Daniel have great potential.

And the best thing is, so far Simon has only eaten of Robbie the dracaena (whom I moved to a high place in the kitchen to discourage the gnawing. Robbie is my second-oldest plant and one of my favorites. I don't want that rotten feline to kill him); the rest he's left alone.

So yes, I'm crazy. But I probably have a high oxygen content in my living quarters (maybe this contributes to the crazy), and I definitely have the peace and tranquility one feels when one can look at lots of still, green, silently growing plants.

Watch out, though...I may turn into the plant lady from Minority Report and start growing plants that can attack at will, thus necessitating "Beware of Plant" signs on my property.

How awesome would that be?

How can I not share this with you?

Song

You're wondering if I'm lonely:
OK then, yes, I'm lonely
as a plan rides lonely and level
on its radio beam, aiming
across the Rockies
for the blue-strung aisles
of an airfield on the ocean

You want to ask, am I lonely?
Well, of course, lonely
as a woman driving across country
day after day, leaving behind
mile after mile
little towns she might have stopped
and lived and died in, lonely

If I'm lonely
it must be the loneliness
of waking first, of breathing
dawn's first cold breath on the city
of being the one awake
in a house wrapped in sleep

If I'm lonely
it's with the rowboat ice-fast on the shore
in the last red light of the year
that knows what it is, that knows it's neither
ice nor mud nor winter light
but wood, with a gift for burning

Adrienne Rich, 1971

The Tale of the Tall Interesting Gentleman

It was a dark and stormy night. Two bright, vivacious young women pulled up along the sidewalk in a sketchy neighborhood in front of their destination -- an old house undergoing renovation, designated by its portico festooned with twinkling lights. Uncertain what to expect, they entered the house...and fell through the rabbit-hole into the craziest party they had attended in South Bend. One of the bright, vivacious young women -- me -- came out with a folded paper in her pocket, on which was drawn, in green marker, a map to a Ukrainian Catholic Church, and, more importantly, a tall interesting gentleman's phone number.

Yes, ladies and gentlemen, I am about to take you through the latest tale in my bizarre saga of frustrated possibilities.

I decided it would behoove me to wait till midweek to give this Tall Interesting Gentleman a call. As he had invited me to attend his church, and as I wanted a break from feeling like shit in Sunday School, I decided to take him up on his offer, both for the cultural experience of the Ukrainian Catholic Church (which, if I remember rightly, was Orthodox for awhile but in the 16somethings went back to Catholicism, preserving a lot of the original liturgical and artistic styles of the Orthodox church within itself) and for a chance to get to know him better. But I didn't want to call him about church on Monday and sound lame, so I thought I would call him on Thursday. Thursday's a good day. Close to the weekend, but with enough notice for him to include me in any weekend plans he might have, once I'd talked to him.

I was too inebriated to think to give this Tall Interesting Gentleman (TIG) my own phone number, and I was rather excited about the ball being in my court. Normally I discipline myself not to make the first move (the only times I have initiated anything turned out poorly, and the other times I almost initiated something I learned the guy in question was interested in/dating someone else, and for dignity's sake was glad I didn't actually get to initiate something), but in this case he was the one who'd given me his number, which counted, and I found myself terribly satisfied at the idea of calling him at my leisure, when I was ready to talk.

So Thursday rolled around, and I geared up my nerves, and dialed his number. (Actually I pressed the "Send" button on my cell phone, having saved his number into it.) I got all ready to say hello and go through the "I'm the Sarah you met last Friday at the party," when...he didn't answer.

I let it ring eight or nine times, thinking perhaps it was a home number, and then had to hang up so I didn't sound crazy, in case he was home and screening his calls. I was confused. I hadn't counted on this turn of events. In every scenario I had envisioned, he might have invited me out over the weekend, he might have agreed to come pick me up for church, he might have agreed to meet me at church, he might have invited me to brunch after church, but he always answered the phone. It didn't even occur to me to think that if I was ready to talk, he might not be.

MP suggested that as a grad student he might have been at an evening class when I called. So I decided to try him in the midafternoon on Friday. He didn't pick up his phone that time either, but it did go to the automated "The Nextel subscriber you are trying to reach is currently unavailable. Please try your call again later" message. So I learned that he had a cell phone, and that he didn't have voice mail.

Hm. Well, I thought, I'm not calling him again today. My number will show up on his phone, so hopefully he'll see that it's the same number as yesterday and call out of curiosity. But I also don't want to look like a psycho repeat-dialer. So I'll call him one more time on Saturday.

No answer then either. At that point I wondered if perhaps he had dropped his phone in the toilet, or run it over with a truck. It was a Saturday, for heaven's sake. So after a conference with MP, she said she wanted a break from her church too, so we decided to trek out together to the Ukrainian Catholic Church and see if we'd run into him.

Of course this all sounded much more noble when we were planning it. In our minds, there was no hint of the desperate "I'm so single and you're tall and interesting and good-looking and well-dressed and you listened to me rave about poetry and you were interested in what I had to say about 'Spring and All' and the slower, better seasons in Pennsylvania and you know how to take care of plants and since I can't get hold of you over the phone I'll collar you in church just in case there was a good reason for not answering my calls and because my curiosity is piqued" symptoms of the woman who has lived too long alone with nothing to do but watch TV; we wanted the cultural experience of the Ukrainian Catholic Church, and if the TIG happened to be there, so much the better.

So we went to the Ukrainian Catholic Church. And it was small and beautiful. The art is very Orthodox and richly colored and gilded. The liturgy is, except for the homily, the announcements, and one collective prayer, entirely sung. And the TIG wasn't there.

It's not like we missed him in the crowd; the crowd consisted of about twenty people. So we squeezed in next to this tiny old lady who was our Ukrainian Good Fairy for the entire Mass and walked us through the liturgy book and showed us when to stand and sit, and which refrains to sing, and asked us if we were baptized into the Catholic church, and when we said no, told us anyway how the Communion was served differently in this church than in the Roman Catholic tradition. She was sweet, and sharp, and adorable, and wonderful. And even though my vocal cords felt a little stretched after the service, I was glad for the cultural experience that I went.

But no TIG.

As we walked out of the church, I said to MP, "I think this is a SIGN FROM GOD." She laughed, and agreed, and I filed it away for my non-dating annals, and am now reporting it to you.

Although I did learn that the TIG is a part-time truck driver on some weekends. So maybe he was out of town; but that still doesn't explain why he doesn't have voice mail (you'd think that would be all the more incentive TO have voice mail). So regardless, I think perhaps he's a bit odd, and I'm not too worried about pursuing his cell phone any further.

At least I got a really cool Mass out of the deal.

And the bright, vivacious young woman resolved to laugh, and keep her chin up, and wait for the next adventure.

The End

TV love

So, difficult as the season has been with Fox airing it so sporadically, my love of House has grown. But tares of concern grew along with the love. With Sela Ward's character's placement at House's hospital, I feared the show would grow too soap-ish and focus too much on a "forbidden passion" instead of the amazing potential for nonsexual relationships between House and the members of his team. I want to see the father-son relationship between House and Chase, the mentor-learner relationship between House and Cameron (because she's the one who tries to make herself needed, but this time she needs him; oh and she's just turning into a really cool character this season), and the teacher-pupil-rival relationship between House and Foreman.

But what I had feared began to take place: too much House and Stacy. Oh no oh no, I thought. Why? Why, show?

BUT Leigh Ann told me that not only is the next new episode airing on the seventh, after nearly a month of absence, but that it is also Sela Ward's last episode.

I should have trusted my show.

Damn you, Billy Collins

Yesterday I went to Wal-Mart for the express purpose of purchasing Corpse Bride, which I had never seen but my faith in Tim Burton is so absolute that I knew it wouldn't matter (and my faith was well-placed). As I surveyed the display in the middle of the floor that sported several versions of Corpse Bride as well as every Pink Panther movie every made, a very cute little boy about the age of three wearing a red coat wandered up from somewhere and began to look at the movies too. I assumed his parents were somewhere nearby. He went in the same direction around the display that I intended to go, so I sort of followed him, being careful not to tromp on his little sneakered feet, and I appreciated the fact that this unusual kid wasn't screaming or clamoring or yelling or making a racket; he was just looking. As we rounded a corner of the display, I glanced up to see a man in his late thirties or early forties watching me with this soft expression, and with the kind of visceral shock you expect when you jump into a lake in April, I realized he thought the little boy was mine.

I guess it looked like a perfect mother-son scenario: This lovely well-dressed young woman sharing a quiet movie moment with her cute and well-behaved little boy.

Suddenly my very good day darkened considerably. I felt a little winded, not because the man was mistaken, but because he was understandably mistaken, and because a part of me that keeps very still and small most of the time leaped up and shouted, That child should be mine! I want a family! What are you waiting for?

I think this is really the first moment I can remember feeling like that. Sure, I've wanted a boyfriend, a fiance, a husband...but to be honest, I've never wanted a kid, except in the most abstract way. Especially after holding inconsolable, irritable, restless babies for nine months in PEDS and just wishing they'd shut up and go to sleep so I could quit holding them because they were driving me crazy, and thinking these thoughts might qualify me as "bad mother" for the time being, I firmly and with a great deal of relief kept the idea of children extraordinarily abstract, and very far in the future. But yesterday, seeing myself through a stranger's eyes with huge amounts of approval as a mother, I realized that the fit would be good, and that I do want children, not abstractly at all. (Not tomorrow, of course, but sooner rather than later.)

I waited till the boy's parents called for him, then bought my movie and walked out to my car in a sort of daze. I very nearly called MP to yell about it in a crazed-single way, because that's funny and tends to relieve angst and restore perspective, but instead I turned on the country radio station (bad idea) and drove home.

Later that evening, feeling rather Wm Had a Headachey and maudlin, I decided to cheer myself up with a few poems by Billy Collins, who in addition to being brilliant is nearly always funny. Instead I read a poem that made me cry with its sweetness. Here it is. (But afterward I watched Corpse Bride and was marvelously, macabrely comforted. What an exquisite creation.)

Love

The boy at the far end of the train car
kept looking behind him
as if he were afraid or expecting someone

and then she appeared in the glass door
of the forward car and he rose
and opened the door and let her in

and she entered the car carrying
a large black case
in the unmistakable shape of a cello.

She looked like an angel with a high forehead
and somber eyes and her hair
was tied up behind her neck with a black bow.

And because of all that,
he seemed a little awkward
in his happiness to see her,

whereas she was simply there,
perfectly existing as a creature
with a soft face who played the cello.

And the reason I am writing this
on the back of a manila envelope
now that they have left the train together

is to tell you that when she turned
to lift the large, delicate cello
onto the overhead rack,

I saw him looking up at her
and what she was doing
the way the eyes of saints are painted

when they are looking up at God
when he is doing something remarkable,
something that identifies him as God.